But I do mean, that as you are wholly indisposed to use your natural powers aright, without the grace of God, no efforts that you will actually make in your own strength, or independent of his grace, will ever result in your entire sanctification.417 “By the assertion, that the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of Christ, is received by faith, to reign in the heart, it is intended, that he is actually trusted in, or submitted to by faith, and his influence suffered to control us. The question comes to be, Is the man good or bad, or only his acts? Its establishment, however, divides men into two classes—the salvable and the unsalvable under the conditions of this wisest government. III. “Sermons on Gospel Themes,” 1876. Free agency implies liberty of will. The value of the object chosen—but, mind you, its moral value—indicates the rightness of its choice. John Morgan, “Holiness Acceptable to God,” 1875. His rejection of a “physical” regeneration seemed to him to remove one of the grounds for inferring it; and his rejection of what he calls a “perpetual” justification removes another. James H. Fairchild gives us a very illuminating sketch of its fortunes there.426 “The visible impulse of the movement,” he says, “to a great extent expended itself within the first few years.” Men sought and found with decreasing frequency the special experiences—“the blessing,” “the second conversion”—which were connected with it as first preached. Following them, the babies form habits of action in accordance with their impulses. B. Warfield (eBook Collection), Christianity, Logic, and Aristotle: God is Required, The Vindication of Wrath - Revelation 16:1-7. Probably no one of those whom Finney had in mind ever intended to say just that “no motive to sin could be a motive or a temptation, if there were not a sinful taste, relish, or appetite, inherent in the constitution, to which the temptation or motive is addressed.” What was intended to be said was, no doubt, that no motive to sin can be a temptation with universal—that is, invariable—effect, unless there is something in those tempted which constitutes a bias to sin. It is the very essence of a system of teleological ethics that the means acquire all the moral quality which they possess from their relation as means to their end. What God has determining regard to in His dealing with both alike, says Finney, is the wise ordering of His government. It may be taken as revealing Finney’s own consciousness of the essentially ethical character of his treatise. It is picked up for himself by each individual in the process of living. 143–166. A. T. Swing, “President Finney and an Oberlin Theology,” in same, July, 1900, pp. To him on the contrary, everything which is not the substance of the soul is one of its acts; and as he cannot attribute sinfulness to the soul itself, he therefore confines all sin to actual sinning. He tells us, however, (p. 843) that he did do so, although on the pressure of Scripture he finally accepts the doctrine, and, indeed gives it an exceptionally full treatment. 8 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2008), 166–214. In the fall of 1836, several of the faculty members, including Morgan and Finney… He prayed in colloquial, common, and "vulgar" language. Self-determination with Finney, means arbitrary self-determination, independent of or in contradiction of the present preference, which is what other people mean by motive. “Introduction to the Critical History of Philosophy,” 1893. As his influence is moral, and not physical, it is plain that he can influence us no farther … than we trust or confide in him.”418 “The Holy Spirit controls, directs, and sanctifies the soul, not by a physical influence, nor by impulses nor by impressions made on the sensibility, but by enlightening and convincing the intellect, and thus quickening the conscience.”419 Everything that the Spirit does for us is thus reduced to enlightenment; everything we receive from Him to knowledge. It differs from that doctrine at this point only in its completer Pelagianism. He is compelled to confess of the reprobate, that “God knows that his creating them, together with his providential dispensations, will be the occasion, not the cause, of their sin and consequent destruction.” Of course, God’s foreknowledge of these results when He created the reprobate, necessarily involves them also in His comprehensive intention; but equally of course the sin and destruction of the reprobate were not His ultimate end in their creation. “Reply to the ‘Warning Against Error,’ written by the Rev. The ground of His election of just them is that there is something in them or in their relations to His system of government of the world, which makes it wise to save them; and this is not true of the others. LECTURES ON REVIVALS OF RELIGION by The Rev. He himself attributes total depravity to man from the first moment of his becoming a free agent, and that is the same as to say from the first moment of his becoming man. A universal will-not, like this, has a very strong appearance of a can-not. It is foreseen that the non-elect cannot be induced to believe—at least wisely—and inducements to believe are not wasted on them. ', 'Nothing tends more to cement the hearts of Christians than praying together. Thus all men become depraved from the very first moment when moral agency begins with them. He soon became disenchanted with Presbyterianism, however (due largely to his growing belief that people could, with God, perfect themselves). The will is thus committed to the gratification of feeling and appetite, when first the idea of moral obligation is developed. Revivals for the Middle Class.Charles Grandison Finney was born the seventh of eight children to a farming family in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in 1792. He has been called The Father of Modern Revivalism. Are the Poor and Minorities Really Better off under Progressive Policy? George Duffield prepared the “Warning against Error,” meaning Finney’s system of teaching, which was sent forth by the Presbytery of Detroit in 1847, with the approval of the Synod of Michigan; and perhaps we may add here, although it was a private publication, that Lyman Beecher printed about 1844 a letter against perfectionism, which was thought important enough for John Morgan to answer it in The Oberlin Quarterly Review.423 In the fateful year of 1841, the Presbyteries of Huron and Grand River in the Western Reserve, and of Richland near by, also passed condemnatory actions: and decided action in the same sense was taken soon afterward by the New York Presbyteries of Chenango, Cortland, Onondaga, Rochester. Here is rather a full statement:352 “I suppose that God bestows on men unequal measures of gracious influence, but that in this there is nothing arbitrary; that, on the contrary, he sees the wisest and best reasons for this; that being in justice under obligation to none, he exercises his own benevolent discretion, in bestowing on all as much gracious influence as he sees to be upon the whole wise and good, and enough to throw the entire responsibility of their damnation upon them if they are lost.353 But upon some he foresaw that he could wisely bestow a sufficient measure of gracious influence to secure their voluntary yielding, and upon others he could not bestow enough in fact to secure this result.” The upshot is that God elects all that it is wise for Him to elect; and as He elects them both to grace and glory, He saves all that it is wise for Him to save. It is at least an arresting phenomenon that the human will, inalienably endowed with an equal power to either part, should exhibit in its historical manifestation two such instances of absolute certainty of action to one part—in one instance affecting the whole mass of mankind without exception, and in the other the whole body of those set upon by the Spirit with a view to their salvation. It might conceivably be presented merely as an attempt to explain the manner in which man actually acquired a depravity to which he has been justly condemned on account of the sin of his first parents. Perhaps if we press the word “agents”—but let us substitute “beings.” Are infants not moral beings? We are all, He and we, members of one ethical body, governed by one ethical law, and pursuing a common ethical course. James H. Fairchild, “The Doctrine of Sanctification at Oberlin,” in The Congregational Quarterly, April, 1876, pp. Are we moral beings only when we are acting, but become unmoral and only brutes whenever we are quiescent? Further afield the Presbytery of Newark had been led to early action, and soon the Presbytery of North River; and it was not long before the Synods of New York and New Jersey424 and of Genesee were compelled by appeals to act in the same sense. Charles G. Finney Chapter 1 Charles G. Finney: A Biographical Sketch Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) was a lawyer who, after converting to Christianity, became one of the foremost American ministers of his day. At Evans Mills, he was troubled that the congregations continuously said they were "pleased" with his sermons. N. S. Folsom, “Review of Mahan on Christian Perfection,” in same, July, 1839, pp. 427 D. L. Leonard, as cited, pp. Experience has shown, however, that it was a delusion. Therefore, “their sufferings and death are to be accounted for as are those of brutes, namely, by ascribing them to physical interference with the laws of life and health.” We suppose this is the proximate cause of the sufferings and death of adults also; but Finney appears to think that, in saying it of infants, he is denying that sin has anything to do with their dying—despite Rom. 363 “Lectures on Systematic Theology,” p. 501. We believe in Christ for our sanctification; He then acts persuasively in our souls for sanctification; under this persuasion we act holily; that is our sanctification. 38–71. It is right. It would not be quite exact to say that Finney permits to Adam no influence whatever on the moral life of his descendants. He constructed a theology that harmonized with the ideals of the Jacksonian era; if President Andrew Jackson was the political folk-hero of early l9th-century America, Charles Grandison Finney was its religious folk-hero. Thus the peculiar ideas and experiences connected with the “entire sanctification” movement gradually lost their appeal. Finney wrote, "I had read nothing on the subject [of the atonement] except my Bible, & what I had there found on the subject I had interpreted as I would have understood the same or like passages in a law book" [ Memoirs, 42]. That is in brief the final form which Oberlin Perfectionism took. For regeneration “implies an entire present change of moral character, that is, a change from entire sinfulness to entire holiness.”400—a “present entire obedience to God.”401 After this it is only a question of maintenance—of the maintenance of that “radical change of ultimate intention,” that change from a selfish ultimate choice to benevolent ultimate choice, which we may call indifferently repentance,402 or faith,403 or conversion, or regeneration, or sanctification. 424 Leonard, as cited, p. 256. He seems, indeed, almost inclined at times to declare that one not a Christian who supposes that “a man is unable to obey God without the Spirit’s agency.” The assertion of ability to obey God without the Spirit’s agency is express. Finney does allow this; and this is his sole concession to the supernaturalism of salvation. 367 “Sermons on Important Subjects,” p. 30. A daily newsletter featuring the most important and significant events on each day in Christian History. Righteousness here too is discovered only in our ultimate choice, from which all the righteousness of subordinate choices, volitions, actions derives. The next night, the entire town turned out, including a man so angry with Finney that he brought a gun and intending to kill the evangelist. After his conversion, Finney prepared for ministry in the Presbyterian church and was ordained in 1824. Presbyterian Presbyteries and Congregational Associations vied with one another in reasoned condemnations of the new doctrine. His parents named him after the model of gentility in the popular novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) by Samuel Richardson. But it is not so well said when we hear next, that what we are to do is to lean “upon Christ, as a helpless man would lean upon the arm or shoulder of a strong man, to be borne about in some benevolent enterprise.” A kind of coöperation is depicted here which makes Christ merely our helper. Canfield slyly remarks that the works which Paul enumerates as works of the flesh, in great part, “exist in a far greater degree in fallen spirits than among men,”—and the fallen spirits have no bodies! B. Dod, “Finney’s Sermons,” in same, July, 1835, pp. 381–392, to “Dr. The ability which he thus ascribes to man as his inalienable possession is not merely that so-called “natural ability” which the New England divines were accustomed to accord to him, and which only recognized his possession of the natural powers by which obedience could be rendered were it not inhibited by man’s moral condition. Called the “father of modern revivalism” by some historians, he paved the way for later revivalists like Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham. “What is virtue?” he asks, and answers: “It consists in consecration to the right end; to the end to which God is consecrated.”404 And “all holiness,” he defines,405 consists in “the right exercise of our own will or agency.” The supreme ultimate end to which in the right exercise of our will we must direct ourselves, if we would be virtuous or holy—these things are one—is the good of being. The local periodical press of course reflected the state of feeling of the several communities. Of course it is not “individualistic” hedonism which Finney teaches, not even merely “altruistic,” to continue to use the phraseology of the modern schools, but “universalistic.” The doctrine which he inculcates is that moral conduct consists in actions directed towards the happiness of all sentient being; from which it follows, to put it briefly, that happiness is the chief good and benevolence the comprehensive virtue, and actions are good or bad according as they do or do not manifest the one and promote the other.411 If we ask what has become of the “right,” in the sense of the morally excellent, conceived as good per se, it can only be said that it has dropped out of sight altogether. W. Bartlett, “ a History of New England Puritans, and he is a! Holiness Acceptable to God government which has been established has not “ backslidden but! 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